Milestones on Mars
It’s been 14 years since Curiosity landed on the red planet. The mission had a life expectancy of just two years, but Curiosity has had its mission extended because of the technology inside the rovers.
Amy Williams, an astrobiologist with the University of Florida and a member of the Curiosity and Perseverance Mars missions, said that extra lifespan is because of its nuclear power system that provide energy to the rovers’ batteries. Plus, the mission’s goals or tasks is updated throughout the years.
“Curiosity's prime mission was one Mars year, so two Earth years,” Williams said “Each time you reach the end of sort of that scheduled timeframe where you said you would accomplish A, B, and C, you go into what's called an extended mission… so every couple of years, we say what the next thing is that we're going to be able to accomplish within our extended missions.
On Earth there are resources to work on vehicles, like cars, for example, have oil change facilities and mechanics. Williams explained that it’s not as easy on Mars when the vehicles need attention to a technical or mechanical issue, but that most of the issues that could occur have already been tested.
“There’s certainly like checkups and things that we can do to kind of monitor the health of the vehicle,’ Williams said. “What we do is we've tested like all the components of the vehicle and the instruments to several lifetimes worth of like how long we expect them to be able to operate nominally…they are tested to multiple lifetimes beyond, the original kind of intention. So, when something breaks, we find a workaround.”
Meanwhile, NASA’s Perseverance rover news, hit a distance milestone: traversing the equivalent of a full marathon on Mars. Williams said it took Perseverance five years and four months to travel that marathon distance, and while that seems like a long period of time, it’s faster in comparison to other Mars missions.
“This speaks to the incredible engineering, how our rovers and vehicles have evolved over the years,” Willaims said. “So, just for context, Curiosity has not completed a marathon yet. I think Curiosity is around 23 miles on the odometer, so getting close, but the Opportunity rover, the Mars exploration vehicle, took 11 years and two months to also complete a marathon.”
The ethics of space
Human space exploration comes with risks -- and questions that run the gamut when it comes to ethics.
Jeff Kahn, the Director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics spoke with Johns Hopkins and was on the latest season of the bioethics podcast Playing God.
When it comes to sending people into space for long duration missions, Kahn said the ethical questions that must be asked all relate to risk, and if the benefits outweigh any negatives.
“We can get people back from the space station, you know, [in] a few days,” Kahn said. “We can't get people back if we're on Mars or if we're en-route to Mars. So, it changes the sort of the risk and benefit calculus in a way that requires a sort of a different paradigm about what we are willing to accept, in terms of risk to individuals who we put in in harm's way.”
When it comes to who, or what, is making these ethical choices, Kahn explained it isn’t just one person or entity, but that everyone can take a bit of responsibility on space exploration decisions.
“The sort of technical answer is NASA, but of course, NASA is a government agency funded by the taxpayers of this country,” Kahn said. “So, it has to be responsive to society at some level. But the actual do we go, do we not go, based on whatever we understand the risks to be, that lives with the Chief Medical Officer of NASA, a guy named J.D. Polk who gets a lot of input. But at the end of the day, he's the one who gets to decide or needs to decide is this risk to life and limb or to health within limits such that the risks are acceptable for the benefits that we hope to get?”
As NASA, agencies and commercial space companies begin to enter a new era of space exploration with new missions to the moon and maybe even Mars and beyond, Kahn said one topic that he raised has to deal with protections for space travelers.
“It's really interesting because there's all sorts of protections for workers on the ground,” Kahn said. “There's OSHA, I mean, there are all sorts of state-level protections so that people who do risky things are protected. We don't have that for space. So, it's likely to be kind of a free-for-all for a while. I think that's keeping people up at night because you'll be able to find people who will do risky things, right? There are enough people who want to go into space who are going to say, ‘Sure, sure, I'll do that. Doesn’t matter what the level of risk is. Just show me where to sign up.’”
